︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  



The journey of my protagonist, the Angel of History
—inspired by Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint, Angelus Novus, and conceptualized by Walter Benjamin in 1940—
functions as a foundational framework for my explorations of image processing technologies. 


The Angel travels through a landscape covered in piles of obsolete technology,
stifled by trade-offs, and obscured by standard settings.
As the Angel navigates this endless spiral of digital 'advancements',
her story probes an ecology of resolutions,
examining the trade-offs between functionality and compromisein the fields of image processing.


Her eyes are staring, her mouth is open, her wings are spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of History.
Her face is turned toward the past, where she perceives a chain of events: catastrophes piling wreckage upon wreckage.
The Angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
But as the pile of debris before her grows skyward, a storm is blowing from Paradise;
it has caught her wings with violence, propelling her into a future to which her back is turned.

This is the storm we call progress.
 
[*transformed from:] Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969: 249.
︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  

0000 — A NEW HOROLOGY: PROGRESS MADE BY BENDS AND BREAKS
  
In a live television performance titled the Collapse of PAL, the Angel of History reflects on the transition from analog Phase Alternate Line signal (PAL, 625 lines, of which 576 visual) to Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB, 720 x 576 pixels).

She expresses her desire to make whole what has been broken, but remains a passive observer, rationalizes the end of the signal, stating:

PAL is just not good enough. 

The Angel mourns its obsolescence as the end of an era, unaware that its moment/um has already propelled her into the cycles of digital collapse, where soon she will be pulled along Holographic PenRose Stairs to Nowhere,

or what engineers call “progress.” 

While the Angel reflects on the violent ending of a signal, traces of PAL persist, haunting the ‘better’ digital systems. Even though DVB offers upgraded quality, she will soon come to realize that resolution is never an endpoint, but an ongoing process of endless bends and breaks.

The Collapse of PAL (rendered version, 2010)
.
 
0001 — MATERIAL: TO FIND RESOLUTION IN THE BREAK 
.
unresolved (84,48 meters long data file painted on canvas, partially wrapped, 2016)
Forced to migrate into the digital realms and upset by the loss of a connection, the Angel's initial actions are disruptive. In Acousmatic Videoscapes she manipulates various layers of digital technology, triggering artifacts caused by feedback, compression and glitches.

But slowly, the Angel starts to recognise something more than pure distortion within these breaks: the ruptures seem to reveal what normally remains hidden within the black box of technology. An observation that prompts her to critically examine the materiality revealed by her breaks.

A key insight comes from Unresolved, an 84,48-meters-long data file that follows a linear Bitmap organization, encoded pixel by pixel, illustrating that digital resolution is no longer solely vertically encoded, like PAL was.

The long, unwrapped line of data demonstrates that digital resolutions are not just quantized vertically, but also horizontally. Moreover, it shows the Angel that a final render depends on how hardware reads, displays, or distorts the data. Resolution is therefore not just a fixed standard, but shaped by the entire technological apparatus, or imaging pipeline, involving production, dissemination, display and reception.

Armed with this new understanding of resolution, the Angel pushes further, conducting experiments aimed at revealing the language of digital compression. She transcodes a self-portrait into nine common compression formats (GIF, BMP, JPEG, etc.). By glitching these visually identical images, she uncovers the unique structure of each compression algorithm, exposing the hidden logic inherent to each file format.

She documents and describes these protocols in A Vernacular of File Formats, highlighting the materiality that defines the digital image.



Now more familiar with the inner workings of various compression formats and the aesthetics of their glitches, the Angel starts to recognise the traces of these digital bends and breaks everywhere. 

In one such instance, she observes a senior Discrete Cosine Transform, (DCT, a key algorithm in JPEG compression that converts 8x8 pixel blocks into 64 frequency components) instructing a Junior DCT how to transcode data from one compression language to another, or as they call it: how to ‘SYPHON.’

In a scene reminiscent of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland (1884), Junior and Senior DCT syphon from one Realm of Compression Complexity to the next. At first, they transcode simple artifacts such as dither, lines and blocks. However, as they navigate into more complex realms—such as wavelets and vectors—they push the limits of their compatibility and ultimately trigger a kernel panic.

From a Staircase to Nowhere, just one complexity beyond them, the Angel tries to intervene, proposing a forked solution to the DCTs. She commits:

This is information! Unlike data, information spans multiple dimensions. It moves upward, not just northward!

But the DCTs have already syphoned back to simpler complexities. 

The Angel develops a fork (modification) of DCT, mapping each of its 64 distinct blocks to the most frequently used characters of the Roman alphabet. A method that allows her to steganographically write in error.

However, for the Angel, this fork of DCT is more than a poetic, steganographic tool; it provides radical access to the inner workings of a JPEG, enabling precise manipulations within the Huffman table. A process that reveals how compression fundamentally alters the essence of image data, transforming image resolution into material evidence of its transcoding. These traces, or compression artifacts left on the file and embedded in its metadata, form a record of compromise within resolution, indexing the algorithmic events along a file’s journey.
.

0010 — GENEALOGY: TRACING LINEAGES OF COMPROMISE
.
The Angel's encounter with the DCTs, combined with the insights she gained from developing her own fork of the algorithm, shift her interest from critical material research to a genealogy of resolutions.

She organizes a Pique Nique Pour les Inconnues; a conference call for all forgotten and unknown faces of color calibration, especially those featured on color calibration test cards.

During the event, the Angel and her visitors are shocked to discover that color calibration not only perpetuates female objectification, but also reinforces racial bias by predominantly featuring white women. Realizing that standardized resolutions are often contribute to inequality, they rally against these systems.

The gathering evolves into a desktop tele-choral performance, during which the group sings Paul McCartney's “We All Stand Together.” They also establish a tactical presence as the i.R.D. (institutions of Resolution Disputes), forming what they call a De/Calibration Army.

The soldiers in the Army use 365 Perfect beautification software to erase all blemishes, enlarge all eyes, and whiten skin over so many iterations that their tones distort, quantized toward a green hue, amplifying the governing standards imposed by both beautification software and algorithms at large.

whiteout (2020)
0011 — SCALE: A SEARCH TO RESOLVE 👁️
The Angel's experiences have made her realize that even the latest software or filter may be rooted in a severely flawed protocol. An insights that makes her pursue more open standards and explore a broader spectrum of manipulation.

Her quest ultimately leads her to a Whiteout: oversaturated with noise and devoid of resolution, the Angel is once again caught in a storm. Struggeling to render anything, she looses a sense of direction amidst the overwhelming distortions. In an attempt to regain perspective, she begins to categorize various lines that could provide a shape of guidance:

a scanline, an outline, a separator, a progress bar, a ruler, a threshold, a mesh, a spline, a timeline, a sequence, an axis, a connector, a link, a pixel, a block, a wavelet, a vector…

Her collection offers her a scape from which to operate. the Angel compiles a Binary Large OBject or BLOB; an uncommitted shape, textured with moiré. The BLOB projects an environment where she no longer needs to follow a specific protocol. Instead, it acts as a container for all im/possible pipelines. The BLOB defies the rigidity of standards, offering a fluid, adaptive space, exposing the oppressive flow of resolution through compromise. 

The BLOB not only illustrates how norms, values, beliefs and expectations influence the development, use, and understanding of resolution, but also directly connects compromise to resolution, providing insight into the cycles of progress and obsolescence. 


Obsolete Gamut at Zenith (2023)
During a long session of stacking lines into the BLOB, the Angel finds herself in a forest of spiraling vectors. One particular grove, designated as ”Wodan’s Trees,” forks quite differently from its surroundings.

It is easily understood why the grove is named after Wodan (Odin), the god who sacrificed an eye for a preview of his own fate: even though its branches continue to grow, they display only an Obsolete Gamut at Zenith, signaling the end of their cycle and impending failure.

But it’s not just the grove that pulls the Angel in. She is captivated by the lore of a vision of future demise, a perspective diametrically opposed to her own fixation on past collapse. Intrigued by this contrasting outlook, she enters the grove, hoping to learn from the Cyclops Wodan’s sense of future vision. 

As soon as she enters, a critical malfunction overtakes her. The Angel, who is used to navigate a past made of bends and breaks, finds herself disoriented when confronted with a future tangled in forked branches and distributed, PenRose-like revisions.

Caught in a recursive double blind between a future already showing signs of collapse, and a past that is obsolete, everything around her seems to be in ruins. 

With no sense of direction; up or down, forward or backward, the Angel feels suspended. Unbeknownst to her, she has tumbled down the abyss of her own Myopia.


Myopia (2015)
. 

Struck by the beam of darkness that comes from her own time, the Angel is adrift through time and space, with no day or night, no axis of rotation, no north or south...

Yet, in the darkness, the Angel notices something else. The absence of light has activated the “off-cells” in her retina, producing a particular type of gray. This not-a-color gray, her Eigengrau, is only visible when she closes her eyes; it exists in contrast with the void surrounding her and allows her to recognize her own blindness; a blindness to her surroundings.

Amidst this profound absence of light and color, the Angel searches for a way to restore the lost electromagnetic frequencies. She builds a Rainbow Generator, designed to refract a Spectrum of Lost and Un/Named Colours. But even though the device gives her control over large bands of frequencies across the spectrum, she still can’t perceive them; the generator only seems to emphasize the limits of her own vision. 

The Angel concludes that her blindness isn’t a result of a lack of light, but rather her not using the right eye/s. In this space, perception may require a different type of sensor—eyes that are larger, slower, and sensitive to other frequencies of light.

With antennas mounted in her eye sockets, she begins scanning the darkness, hoping to build an image from its echoes. This new form of vision does not rely on illumination, but operates within the realms of shadow knowledge, where operational images - synthetic images rendered by machines for machines - capture dimensions and scales beyond her usual perception. Like a satellite mapping the Earth’s topography with radar, she now collects data of her surroundings.

Spectrum of Lost and Unnamed Colours (2024)




Rainbow Generator (2024)
)
CyCLOPS Retina (in collaboration with Kimchi and Chips, commissioned Install for Thin Air @The Beams, 2023)

Refractions in light and time (2023)

ALEV 01 + ALEV 02
  
AKMS01 + AKMS02
   
SOUN01 + SOUN02
ASGA01 + ASGA02 
MATS02 + MATS01 -
TROU01 + TROU02
IN MILITARY ZONE
CyCLOPS.cy Corner Reflector network an optical infrastructure supporting the Sentinel satellite (2024)
.

The Angel sends radar into the darkness surrounding her, scanning through different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. After collecting a dataset large enough to compile an image, she hopes to create map of her surroundings.

But instead, she finds a glitch.

Progress, once symbolized by the Holographic PenRose Stairs to Nowhere, is rendered broken, resolving instead as a vast cairn of nonsensical vectors. This glitched cairn, reminiscent of a Spomenik, a monument commemorating no specific moment or entity, suggests that either her dataset is faulty, or her tools cannot render the dataset correctly.

At a loss, the Angel considers the Spomenik glitch, a symbol for the collapse of progress. She approaches it cautiously, tracing the fragmented edges of its vectors. The Spomenik is layered, its sediments of resolution thick with histories she had never considered. Through one of its shredded sides, she peers into its Delta Axis, which reveals a repository of render objects; metadata about its provenance, acquired while moving through various platforms. Some of its fragments seem synthetic, as if they were generated by AI systems. 

Like a media archaeologist from the future, the Angel tries to reconstruct what has been lost, broken, or simply unrendered, piecing together a fragmented image of a history that was never meant to be seen. But the synthetic data, created outside her realm of understanding, introduces complexity. She realizes that one of the main failures in rendering her dataset is that the holographic images no longer support traditional assets like DCTs.
Panic sets in.

But the Angel recalls her own recommendation of verticality. If her tools cannot interpret this synthetic data, perhaps there is another framework that can calibrate the misalignments. Beaming into the darkness around her, the Angel desperately seeks an external calibration tool.

Finally, on a C-Band frequency commonly used for long-distance communication by Sentinel satellites, she receives an echo. Metadata confirms its provenance: a corner reflector from the CyCLOPS network, a system designed to calibrate data misaligned across time and space.

By bouncing her dataset through the CyCLOPS' corner reflector, the Angel corrects the phase difference and aligns the data across dimensions. To her relief, the image suddenly becomes clear. The Spomenik glitch wasn’t a failure of the dataset she collected, but a misalignment between the Angels and synthetic data systems. Without proper calibration, the data had been erroneously wrapped and distorted.

Following this crucial realization, the Angel starts compiling an Atlas of the Destitute of Vision, a collection of maps that illuminate the hidden frameworks governing how we render. The Atlas describes how the resolution of an image is not simply about seeing clearly; to resolve means to filter, to use lenses, and to accept blind spots. Different artifacts index different forces, compromises and affordances.  

Just as a blur - or lack of resolution - may indicate censorship or governance, a glitch may indicate a complexity of formatting. Resolution, the Angel concludes, is not just a quantitative measure of pixel count or clarity. Resolution is about fidelity, about who controls what is rendered and left unresolved, governed by forces both human and artificial. This is why the study of resolutions should not solely focus on what is resolved, but also on what is collapsed, broken, obsolete, or unsupported. It must inquire into genealogies, technological limits, and embedded biases. To study resolution is to consider both what is rendered and what is compromised.

Once a passive observer of past collapses, the Angel finds herself fallen out of the technological curve, struggling to access the tools needed for resolution. She is caught in the ripples of distortion caused by the upgrade.
A Holographic PenRose stairs to Nowhere
.


Shredded Hologram Rose (2023)
   

Spomenik (4x4 meters projection mapped wooden installation; 2017) 
As installed at Transfer Gallery New York, for Behind White Shadows

Shadow Knowledge and De/Calibration Target (2023)

︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  


Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions. Her work focuses on noise artifacts resulting from accidents in both analogue and digital media.

The journey of her protagonist, the Angel of History—inspired by Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint, Angelus Novus, and conceptualized by Walter Benjamin in 1940—functions as a foundational framework for her explorations of image processing technologies.

Complementing her practice, she published Glitch Moment/um (INC, 2011), a book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts. She further explored the politics of image processing in Beyond Resolution (i.R.D., 2020). In this book, Rosa describes how the standardization of resolutions promotes efficiency, order, and functionality, but also involves compromises, resulting in the obfuscation of alternative ways of rendering.

In 2019, Rosa won the Collide Arts at CERN Barcelona award, which inspired her recent research into im/possible images, consolidated in the im/possible images reader (published by the i.R.D. & Lothringer, with support from V2, 2022).

From 2018 to 2020, Rosa worked as Substitute Professor of Neue Medien & Visuelle Kommunikation at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.
Since 2023, she has been running the Im/Possible Lab at HEAD Geneve. Class materials can be found here; please copy <it> right!.

Recent work can be found in this pdf portfolio.
This website was made possible with the financial support of the Stimuleringsfonds.nl (2018)
I am grateful to have received a basis stipend from the Mondriaan Fund (2018-2021) and just recently: 2023 - 2027!
︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎